MONTREAL - What do a couple of sociology professors talk about over coffee on a hot July morning in Montreal?

The Canadiens, of course.

Twenty years separate Mort Weinfeld, who’s 62 and teaches at McGill, from his former pupil, 42-year-old Vanier College teacher Avi Goldberg. What unites them is a passionate interest in this city’s hockey team.

Which doesn’t make them unique as Montrealers – or even as academics. Had it been two astrophysicists on the terrasse of Starbucks on Monkland Ave. this week, odds are the conversation might have turned to the potential star magnitude of first-round draft choice Alex Galchenyuk. Economists would have analyzed Brandon Prust’s $10-million contract, offering a Keynsian perspective on the value of tough guys.

I could go on: theologians talking Habs as religion, political scientists assessing whether a deep playoff run would have siphoned the spotlight from student demos.

But you get the point. Regardless of the digits on the calendar or the humidex, the average finger of the average Montrealer is never far from the pulse (or prostate) of our hockey team.

The sociology professors have been comparing notes on hockey since Weinfeld taught Goldberg in the grad program at McGill.

With the exception of the early 1970s – when he was doing his doctorate at Harvard and enjoying “Bobby Orr in his prime, the greatest player who ever laced on skates” – Weinfeld has spent his life in Montreal.

Goldberg was born here but grew up in Edmonton when Wayne Gretzky was laying alternative claim to the title of best hockey player ever. But his No. 1 Oiler, Goldberg hastens to add, was Mark Messier.

No one at our table put forward the candidacy of Gordie Howe – although one of the treasured memories of Weinfeld’s youth is an encounter with the immortal Red Wing at the players’ entrance to the Forum.

The Ph.Ds put doctrinal differences aside to collaborate on a paper titled Pondering the Permutations of Therrien 2.0 (the full text of which you can read at The Gazette’s Canadiens website, hockeyinsideout.com). In it, the professors apply their specialized knowledge to analysis of how Michel Therrien might fare in his second stint as head coach of the Canadiens.

“Effective strategic and tactical preparation is premised on making realistic assessments of a team’s talent,” Weinfeld and Goldberg write. “When Therrien used his opening press conference to evaluate his new players, we decided to use some statistical data to test his claims.

“Among other possibilities, overly generous or naive remarks by the coach could be seen as indicating poor talent assessment skills. They would also provide credibility to the fear that a pathway had been cleared toward a redux of Therrien 1.0.”

The sociologists were reassured by the new coach’s identification of “highly talented core players with whom he was ready to work to ensure the 15th-place finish would be an aberration.”

In enumerating his assets, Therrien listed the Canadiens No. 1 line of David Desharnais, Max Pacioretty and Erik Cole, goaltender Carey Price, emerging stud defenceman P.K. Subban, and the centre who deserves better wingers than he had last season, Tomas Plekanec.

You don’t need a doctorate in sociology or Therrien’s bus miles in the Q and the AHL to realize that the aforementioned players are the Canadiens’ best. But Weinfeld and Goldberg use some interesting statistics to buttress Therrien’s evaluation – notably Plekanec’s point total exceeding those of every second-line centre of the final four playoff teams, except Patrik Elias of New Jersey, and Subban’s plus-9 being better than any other defenceman on a non-playoff team.

“I don’t know if NHL clubs, in evaluating their talent, use data like they did in Moneyball,” Weinfeld said, citing Michael Lewis’s bestseller about Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s. “We decided to take a stab at assessing Therrien, using the best data we could find.”

“It was a systematic effort,” Goldberg said, “but not to the extent of sabremetrics in baseball.”

The genesis of the project was Weinfeld’s skepticism about the Therrien hiring. The McGill prof is a faithful viewer of L’Antichambre and rated Therrien’s contributions to the hockey schmoozefest as decent but unexceptional.

If NHL general managers judged coaches by the acumen they display on L’Antichambre, however, Michel Bergeron’s phone would ring more often.

“I’m willing to give Therrien a chance,” Goldberg said. “I love his passion. And he’s not afraid to take on the challenge of a pressure-cooker market.”

There ensued a long, caffeine-fuelled discussion of coaching methods. The success of John Tortorella notwithstanding, does an authoritarian approach work with today’s 24-year-old players? And is there a best-before date on any coach’s motivational methods?

In their paper acknowledging the accuracy of Therrien’s initial assessment of the talent with whom he’ll be working, the professors admit they leave a fundamental question unanswered:

“Did a 15th-place team with a solid core of players reveal a coaching regime that had no clue, or did it reek of other deficiencies that not even a Toe Blake, Scotty Bowman or Jacques Lemaire could overcome on his own?”

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